Byelection results in four states show BJP cannot be complacent after Lok Sabha victory

Byelection results are straws in the political wind. Results from 18 assembly bypolls in four states show that BJP’s unprecedented gains in the Lok Sabha earlier this year do not automatically translate into gains in local elections. Voters have once again shown that different imperatives guide them in national and state elections and politicians can be complacent only to their peril.

In Bihar, Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar’s new mahamandal alliance, a shotgun marriage that’s touted by them as “anti-snake venom medicine”, has succeeded in stopping the Modi wave in its tracks. Of 10 assembly seats that went to polls, BJP held six in 2010. Now it has been reduced to four, with RJD winning three, JD(U) two and Congress one. Interestingly, BJP lost five of the six seats it held. Bihar’s politics is in a churn and though BJP picked up three new seats, one of them belonged earlier to new alliance partner, Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP. Among BJP’s losses was the party stronghold of Bhagalpur which it has continuously held since 1990, only for Congress to wrest it back now.

The success of Nitish Kumar’s political gamble has revived Lalu Prasad’s political fortunes, shown the limits of BJP’s political mobilisation and ensured that Bihar’s upcoming assembly election is still up for grabs. As state BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi summed up, the political score is now “1-1”, and the game will now be resumed in its “final round”. The JD(U)-RJD-Congress grand alliance still has to show it stands for more than the sum of its caste alliances but this performance will give it breathing space till the assembly elections. At the same time, the state BJP now knows its limitations in the absence of the all-encompassing Modi factor in local contests.

In Karnataka too Congress got a fillip, winning two seats out of three and wresting Bellary Rural from BJP, held earlier by local heavyweight B Sreeramulu. BJP’s lone victory in Shikaripur came with a significantly reduced margin. While Punjab produced no surprises with a 1-1 score between Akali Dal and Congress, Madhya Pradesh’s BJP-Congress scoreline of 2-1 means that BJP dropped one seat here too. Byelections are, by no means, a referendum on the Modi government’s first months. But these results mean that BJP should not take its current ascendance as irreversible. NDA must focus on performance and outcomes now.

This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.